Today's non-adventure

Checked the "loose sands Notibius zone" part of Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area (too lazy to take a pic so here is a pic of the entrance in winter, it looks about the same but browner since Rhus/Malosma/Lepidospartum/Ericameria/cacti make up most of the remaining green vegetation, also the interior is aesthetically similar to the entrance not as disturbed looking) to see if it had any cool summer endemics the more stable sand elsewhere lacks.

Kind of disappointed the Cryptocephalus there were still spurcus, also found a whole bunch of 5mm-ish microweevils on scalebroom flowers I didn't keep because they looked like they might be gall inquilines (weevil larvae as a general rule are endophages on seeds and other high-calorie plant parts and these were too fat to fit into any of the seeds nearby. Even if they were stem borers or root eaters though I'm not willing to take any chances because I only have one scalebroom myself and it's still in its whiteleaved "larval" stage, assuming that's even the oviposition host, and I don't happen to have either mature individuals or any individuals of any of the other plants in that microhabitat).

No big deal though, I was expecting pretty much exactly all this to happen (and I did take home both the spurcus I caught anyways, for genetic diversity, so I'm not exactly complaining). I wonder if the unmarked and/or sunshine yellow morph lives in my area? Well, probably not the latter, that's probably a high-desert special, but unmarked beige ones seem likelier. The stripes undoubtedly help them camouflage on marcescent leaves/seedheads of pinebush so I've been looking on scalebrooms for stripeless ones, albeit to no avail (scalebrooms seem to provide poorer habitat somehow [probably due to their vestigial adult leaves translating to poorer microclimate protection and poorer edible leaflitter], this year I only saw one on that plant and it was striped and it got away).

The previous spurcus are both gone [one released after it laid enough eggs, the other escaped and died and I still feel extremely bad about its death] so my current cryptocephaline population remains at two, not counting the 32 eggs.